While trying their luck at a life in the U.S., Alex and Carolina shared one bicycle to get to and from work — her for the day shift, him at night.
One night in 2020, it was around 10 p.m. when Carolina was hit by a car in downtown Springfield while riding home in the dark; a hit-and-run. The couple, with two children, who MassLive is not fully naming because of their undocumented status, had to save up enough money to buy another bike.
But with a change of law in Massachusetts, Alex, from the Dominican Republic, was able to attain his driver’s license, and Carolina, from Colombia, is within sight, with only her road test remaining. A joyful picture saved on his phone shows Alex holding up his paper license on the day he passed last September.
“For me, that day was amazing,” he said in Spanish through a translator. “I celebrated it as if I won $1 million.”
July 1 marks the one-year anniversary of the Work and Family Mobility Act becoming law in Massachusetts — 365 days, during which undocumented immigrants have been able to apply for standard driver’s licenses. They are not eligible for Real ID licenses unless their legal status changes in the future.
What took years of grassroots organizing on the part of Driving Families Forward — a coalition of more than 270 organizations founded and co-led by the Brazilian Worker Center and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union — culminated with success in 2022.
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The Legislature passed the related bill that year, but then-Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed it. And while the House and Senate successfully overrode the veto, it was voters who gave the final say by approving a state election ballot question in November 2022.
The law went into effect on July 1, 2023, and since then, all eligible Massachusetts residents, regardless of immigration status, have been able to apply for a driver’s license by undergoing a vision screening, learner’s permit exam and subsequent road test.
Javier Luengo-Garrido, a Western Massachusetts-based organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union, recalled the number of available appointments at the Registry of Motor Vehicles being in the single digits in the four to five weeks after the law was activated.
“It was such a high volume of interest,” he said. “And interest has been sustained throughout the year.”
In that sense, while advocates had spent years organizing to see the law passed, the real work had just begun — ushering people through the process.
133% increase in driver’s licenses issued
Estimates peg the total number of undocumented immigrants in the state at around 250,000. When the Work and Family Mobility Act went into effect, officials at the RMV said it would enable more than 100,000 people to apply for licenses in Massachusetts for the first time.
In late December, data showed more than 90,000 learner’s permits and 50,000 licenses had been issued in the first six months after the law was enacted.
According to the most recent data provided to MassLive by the RMV, those numbers have exploded. Since July 1, 2023, 180,992 new learner’s permits (a 163% increase over 2022) and 125,775 driver’s licenses (a 133% increase over 2022) have been issued.
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The RMV doesn’t maintain data on how many licenses are issued to undocumented immigrants specifically, but they say the year-over-year increases are the best way to estimate.
“We feel we had a fantastic implementation over the last year,” Colleen Ogilvie, registrar of the RMV, said in an interview. “It was a massive program.”
The underlying goal behind the policy initiative was to allow individuals who are not lawful U.S. residents be able to participate more fully in society by having a driver’s license; to go to and from work, care for their families, and be more active members of their communities.
Roldys Leal, who gave MassLive permission to identify him by his full name, wanted some sort of official document to mark his presence here — a means of minimizing risks. His journey over the last 20 years had taken him from Cuba to Spain, to Western Massachusetts, where he arrived five months ago in search of new opportunities.
What a driver’s license gave him was more than that. He said through a translator that it “significantly improved my mobility and independence, allowing me to integrate more fully into my new environment and take advantage of various opportunities.”
The licenses also enable undocumented immigrants to obtain car insurance, which is required in Massachusetts.
Activists led by Movimiento Cosecha rally in front of the State House in April 2019, one of many Beacon Hill demonstrations in recent years calling for lawmakers to allow undocumented immigrants to acquire driver’s licenses. (State House News Service, File)
Several Massachusetts police chiefs supported the law because they felt the more people who study the driver’s manual in a manner deemed sufficient by the state, the safer the commonwealth’s roads will be.
Ogilvie said it took a year of work for the RMV to set up the necessary services, consider the needs of its new customer base, and revamp its operational system. The state’s 2024 fiscal year budget authorized the agency to spend $28 million on launch costs.
Advocates agree implementation of the law has been an enormous lift for the RMV, which has had to verify foreign documents, translate resources into numerous languages and develop procedures to ensure data privacy.
In December, the RMV said it had hired 250 frontline staff and road test examiners to accommodate the increased customer volumes.
And while the agency has stepped up to meet the challenge, advocates say, there are still kinks that can be ironed out to further improve accessibility.
For example, while key materials are being translated into 15 languages, much of the initial information provided on the RMV website has to be navigated first in English, a barrier that’s enough to end someone’s pursuit there.
New this month, the RMV is setting up “navigator stations” inside some of its busiest, high language demand service centers — Haymarket (Boston), Brockton, Springfield, Lowell and Watertown. Located in the lobbies, a bilingual staff member will assist people with what they need or are looking for, so their time at the counter with a service representative is maximized.
It takes a village
It’s been a long road for Alex and Carolina, who met in Paraguay and came to the U.S. within four months of each other in 2017.
When Alex, 40, first arrived alone in Springfield, he was “literally sleeping on the floor,” he said, and sometimes outside; working various jobs in car detailing, snow shoveling and cleaning.
When Carolina, 38, joined him, she worked at a job for a month without pay as a way to prove her value to the business.
Their lives have improved seven years later, and if Carolina passes her future road test, they’ll both be licensed drivers — able to easily commute to work, bring their children to medical appointments, and experience what Alex described as “that feeling of freedom, the feeling of being able to have a life.”
“It’s so important for us to feel that when we’re driving, when we’re in the streets, we are licensed and we have a driver’s license that states who we are,” Carolina said in Spanish through a translator. “And that might be a tiny step into the future for us to be secure and give our children the better life they deserve.”
Alex said it was a “necessity” for them to pursue their licenses in terms of improving their circumstances. And he doesn’t take the responsibility lightly.
“I know driving in the U.S. is not a right, it’s a privilege,” he said. “I was not going to raise my family driving without a license and I knew if I got a license, I was going to be able to save money to get a car. And by having a car, all of the places I was not able to apply for jobs, now all of a sudden I would be able to provide better for my family.”
Luengo-Garrido, of the ACLU, is part of several WhatsApp chat groups where people regularly text their license pictures and “everybody cheers.”
“We hear constantly about being able to drive your kids to school,” he said. “If your kid is sick in the middle of the night, being able to take them to the ER. Being able to go to work and if you have a parent-teacher conference, you can make it. Being able to drive, all of a sudden an hour-and-a-half bus ride becomes 20 minutes.”
Luengo-Garrido spoke of a young mother from Mexico who took her driving test in Greenfield. He translated for her when the RMV official told her she’d passed.
“Her stressed-out face transformed into this almost crying, wide, happy smile,” he said. “She said the only thing she does for fun is go to the Holyoke Mall to go for a walk, and now she was going to be able to take her children to the lake or if they wanted to take swimming lessons at the Y.”
Behind each undocumented individual who gets their license is a mountain of support and coordination by advocates and community groups.
Many hold study sessions at churches and public libraries, as well as weekly office hours for people who need assistance with documents or internet access. Translators often accompany people to the RMV, too, and community members serve as sponsors, allowing the use of their vehicles for driving tests.
Sarah Takasaki, an organizer with the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, speaks during a weekly clinic on obtaining driver’s licenses under the Work and Family Mobility Act. (Courtesy of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center)
Sarah Takasaki, an organizer with the Northampton-based Pioneer Valley Workers Center, said advocates like herself can go to the Springfield RMV on any given day and find people “who need a hand.”
The center, which serves low-wage and immigrant workers, often saw people driving unlicensed for their jobs in construction and agriculture. It was a risk they were willing to take, Takasaki said, to provide for their families, even amid the possibility of encountering law enforcement.
When police stop an unlicensed driver, they can either let them go with a summons to appear in court or arrest them.
Takasaki called the Work and Family Mobility Act a “big motivator” for people whose daily commute to work was filled with uncertainty.
“It’s been difficult in a lot of ways and also really gratifying,” she said. “It’s been such an involved process. I have people I saw in July last year, and I’m still seeing them for questions about the process.”
There may be little administrative things, she added, but “it’s so many people who need help.”
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Both Luengo-Garrido and Takasaki noted some people take the $30 learner’s permit test multiple times before passing. That adds up financially, especially when being there in the first place means missing work.
Because of that, they emphasize fast is not the way to go in this process; that someone should take their time, truly learn the driver’s manual and make sure they have all of the necessary documents.
Undocumented immigrants are still held to certain documentation requirements under the Work and Family Mobility Act, including proof of Massachusetts residency, Social Security status and a birth certificate. If their documents aren’t in English, they need to be translated ahead of time for the RMV, which many nonprofits and community groups assist with.
Leal, the Cuban immigrant, said it would have been “impossible” to navigate the process without the assistance of staff at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center.
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There are also bad actors who have taken advantage of immigrants seeking a license under the new law, Ogilvie said, particularly because some come from countries where it costs “exorbitant amounts” to access government services.
It costs $115 total in Massachusetts for a permit, road test and issuance of a license, she said, and “if anyone tells anyone it’s more, it’s not true.”
Language access could still be improved, advocates say
The state’s learner’s permit exam is available in 35 languages, while key documents related to obtaining a license are translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Haitian Creole, French, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, Khmer, Cape Verdean Creole, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Pashto.
But translation still isn’t consistent across all platforms and modes of RMV communication, advocates say.
“It would be beautiful to see an extension of language accessibility,” Luengo-Garrido said. “The accessibility they have created is unprecedented, but it’s gonna take time in some of the automated ways of communication, such as email or text messages. Still, it’s in English.”
Ogilvie said she sees the Work and Family Mobility Act as a “continuous improvement journey.” Since the beginning, the RMV has worked closely with community groups to iron out issues playing out in real-time at service centers, and it will continue to do so, she said.
“Certainly as a government entity, we have a responsibility for regulation and compliance in meeting standards, but there’s also the human factor in that people are coming in for services,” Ogilvie said. “I felt really strongly that we needed to lead an effort to lean in and communicate with all of those different representative groups so we could understand.”
Because the RMV website is maintained by the commonwealth as part of its larger network of government websites, the agency doesn’t have the ability to present content in other languages, she said. But there is Google Translate, she noted, to assist people with navigating initial materials written in English.
The points raised by advocates, Ogilvie said, “are part of our continuous journey to say, where are those areas we can improve in and continue communication?”
